1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to selecting total job time for printing. In particular, the invention relates to selecting total job time for printing without knowing the job size.
2. Description of the Related Art
The prior art was focused upon knowing the job size (i.e. the number of pages) in order to select an engine speed for delivering a faster total job time. Job size in the prior art would be determined in one of two ways:
1. Job size would be determined implicitly by forcing the printer to warm up to a lower speed point. This would be accomplished by a menu setting and would provide for a better job time for short jobs, but would penalize all jobs that had large page counts.
2. The page count in the prior art would be specified by the job itself up front—where the engine would warm up accordingly. The problem with this approach is that the job size is not generally specified in the job and almost all the host applications do not have the infrastructure required to provide this data.
It would therefore be desirable to provide a method and system for improving total job time—the time to first print and the time to first copy—without needing to know the job size. In this way it would be possible to eliminate the need for modifying the job or the host application that is used to create and to send the job.